Microsoft's least loved operating system, since Microsoft Bob, has been taken for a walk in a Berlin forest and discretely shot in the back of the head. Microsoft said that the service pack-free version of Vista will no longer be supported after April. The OS which hit manufacturers in late 2006 is left entirely at the mercy of hackers.

Ironically Redmond isn't switching off the security updates on its  more popular, but much older operating systems - Windows XP SP2, as well as all version of Windows 2000 until July. Microsoft's Eric Ligman warned on the company's SMB community blog th that engineers may not be able to help resolve this until you have upgraded to a supported level.

Vista is currently on Service Pack 2 and Microsoft considers this as a "bare minimum" for decent support.